


a rose by any other name

by hawkeish



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Anders is a lovesick puppy, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Humor, Hawke's a mess with emotions, One Shot, they're cute your honour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 18:47:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29230233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hawkeish/pseuds/hawkeish
Summary: When Anders wakes up, the world smells like roses. Which is strange, because down in the Undercity, the world usually faintly smells of shit and despair.Anders wakes up to find that Hawke - and all his clothes - have mysteriously disappeared. Turns out, it's not entirely a coincidence.You want some sweeet handers fluff? Here's some sweet handers fluff, written for the wonderful marimoes/noswordstyle and the DA DWC on tumblr
Relationships: Anders/Female Hawke, Anders/Hawke (Dragon Age)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 27





	a rose by any other name

When Anders wakes up, the world smells like roses. Which is strange, because down in the Undercity, the world usually faintly smells of shit and despair.

Scowling against the gentle attack of the morning light where it sifts in through the windows high above, Anders lays there half-covered in his thin, bobbling bedsheets and drinks in the heady perfume, delights in it. It must be love, he reasons, because he’s very in love with Hawke. Love-drunk, a poet might have called it. Sick off it. It’s that hideous, mushy kind of love that balladeers sing about, where you can’t help but think their laugh is made of moonlight and everything they touch is blessed by the Maker himself.

Justice hates it, though Justice likes Hawke, occasionally.

A smile dances at the edge of Anders’ lips at the thought of her. Slowly, quietly, he shifts onto his side, expecting to see her curled up with most of his sheets wound around her and a silvered trail of drool staining her cheek, like usual.

When he finds the other half of his narrow, creaky bed empty, sheets thrown aside, he frowns.

“Masha?”

No response. 

Strange, again, because Marian is most ardently _not_ an early riser. Usually, he’s up hours before her: “Does Justice never fucking _sleep_?” she always mutters, when he nudges her awake and hands her the cup of mellow Antivan coffee that he makes her every time they share a bed.

Which is increasingly often, these days. Though they’ve only been whatever they are for a handful months, and though Hawke insists on sneaking around as though they’re fumbling teenagers, the words _can you stay?_ have stumbled off her tongue more times than he’s been able to count in the last few weeks. Each time, she’s blushed a little less and has been able to hold eye contact more, too. Although she still flushes and groans and wraps her arms around herself as she stands before him, looking something between helpless and hopeful, but mostly like she wants to do nothing more than cease existing altogether.

Each time, Anders can barely wait for her to finish speaking before he answers.

The answer is always yes, and it is always sealed with a kiss that makes him feel like he’s only just discovered what it is to be alive.

“Ri?” he tries as he kicks the covers off him and swings his legs to the edge of the bed, wondering whether she’s not in the mood for niceties. “Hawke?”

No reply.

With a sigh, he reaches down into the modest chest beside his bed for some pants. If she’s already left, that’s fine; this isn’t exactly the Amell estate, where you awake in a four-poster bed, swaddled in an unholy amount of duvet, birdsong drifting through the open window. Down here, you’re serenaded by the distant cries of the hungry and the poor as you lay wrapped up in each other, which makes romance somewhat more difficult. 

And Marian’s her own woman, after all. She doesn’t _have_ to stay, although Anders feels an ache in his chest at the thought of her choosing otherwise. He’s just a sentimental bastard, though, he knows. After years in the Circle, years of not being able to wake up beside someone and do something so mundane as ask them how they slept—

Anders’ hand hits the thin base of the chest, his knuckles scraping against wood.

“ _What_?”

His clothes have vanished. Every single piece—from his smalls to the feathered coat he’d thrown across the chair by his desk the evening before. 

_Fuck_. Heart dropping to his stomach, Anders jerks to his feet, then instantly remembers that he’s stark naked and grabs his bedsheets to wrap around his waist in a panic. For a moment, he just stands there, wondering how in Andraste’s blesséd name he managed to sleep through someone stealing a very specific set of his belongings.

And then he realises that, distantly, someone’s humming an old Ferelden folk-song. Poorly and very-out of-tune, mind, but he recognises it all the same: it’s a nonsense-song his mother used to sing when he was young, about wandering round the moors and getting eaten by ducks because you forgot to bring a hat. It’s the kind of song that Marian would like, he thinks. Marian likes nonsense. Marian _is_ nonsense, half the time, and it makes him love her even more fiercely.

Something clicks. Letting out a soft sigh of realisation, Anders holds the sheets around him and heads straight for the clinic’s main hall.

“What the _fuck_ ,” he calls, as he stops in the middle of the vast, sun-lit chamber, “did you do to all of my clothes?”

Caught in the act, Hawke freezes and lets out a small “oh, _shit_.”

Dressed only a loose, billow-sleeved shirt that barely reaches her mid-thigh, she’s balanced on one leg, reaching up to hang some of his smallclothes over a makeshift drying line she’s tied around a couple of wooden pillars. A steaming vat of water sits by her side—his bath, now commandeered for other uses, in which floats even more of his things. At her feet, too, are little heaps of clothes, divided by type: undershirts, pants, even the bandages he wraps around the top of his boots and the fraying sleeves of his coat. Said coat, in all its anting crow’s glory, has been delicately laid across one of the beds dotted around the room, reverently arranged to dry as though it graces its own, humble altar.

There’s not much, because he doesn’t _have_ much. But somehow, Hawke’s managed to spirit every single piece of his clothing away without so much as waking him, and Anders can’t help but be impressed.

And cold, because he’s stood with only his bedsheets protecting his dignity. “Marusya, I need—”

“Before you ask,” Hawke interrupts, her cheeks ruddying slightly, “you don’t smell. At least, no worse than anyone else I’ve slept with.”

Ah, her token charm. Anders snorts. “Thank the Maker. That’s…reassuring. So you’re doing this _why_ , exactly?”

“To be nice,” she replies, frowning. “Or is this not nice? I can stop—you can be sweaty if you’d like—”

“No, by all means _,_ ” Anders breaks in, bridging the gap between the two of them. As he approaches, she looks distinctly uncomfortable, as though she hadn’t wanted him to know, and also tired—her eyes are a bit puffy, and she’s making that face she makes when she would much rather be in bed.

How long has she been up, singing her songs? Stealing his clothes? Doing all this, for him?

At the thought, Anders has to stop himself from grinning like a fool. He gestures to the piles, watching as she very obviously tries to force herself not to flush a deep, rosy red. “This is the most work I think I’ve ever seen you do.”

“How dare you,” she retorts, snatching the last of his three shirts from the floor and dunking it into the hot water, rather theatrically. “I have a job that I am in fact _very_ good at.”

“Extorting money and information from unfortunate and usually bad people via the use of violence is not a _job,_ Masha,” he replies, with a sleepy grin. “Although you are indeed good at it.”

Scarily good. Terrifyingly good. As if she was born to be the scourge of Kirkwall. Sometimes, he wonders whether he should be worried that this is the woman he loves.

As she stands in front of him with her damp hands on her hips, tired-eyed and smiling softly, he knows he never will be.

“Well, you’ve ruined your own surprise,” Hawke notes. “Did you think I’d disappeared into the night? I have a little more class than _that_ , you know.”

“Only a little,” Anders retorts, reaching out to draw her towards him.“And that doesn’t matter. This is…”

Featherlight, Hawke places one hand on his chest, on the scar that weaves across the skin above his heart in a pearlescent thread. With the other, she reaches up to brush her fingers through the soft hair by his temple, smiling to herself. “Wonderful? Heartwarming? The kindest thing anyone has ever done for you?”

“Something like that,” Anders murmurs, and when he kisses her, the world smells like roses.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!! I absolutely loved writing this one - it's either full-blown fluff or angst central with me. I'd love to know what you think - feel free to come say hi [over on tumblr](https://hawkeish.tumblr.com/) or [twitter!](https://twitter.com/abitofatit)
> 
> bonus points if anyone knows which traditional English folk-song I'm referencing, and don't judge the Shakespeare title, I promise I'm not that pretentious


End file.
